Big numbers can be hard to comprehend, and when it comes to gaming few titles have as many big numbers as Minecraft. There are more than 18 quintillion worlds to explore in Mojang’s groundbreaking (pun fully intended) title, with 241m logins a month, and more than 11,000 skins downloaded every second, just to give you an idea of how popular the game is.

Now, however, the game has hit a new, even more incredible mark, with Minecraft crossing 1,000,000,000,000 views on YouTube. That’s 1 trillion, or a million million views, for a game that was released more than a decade ago, and has for most of its life been derided as a ‘lego game for kids’. An amazing milestone, we are sure you agree, for any game in any era to hit.

For some perspective, if every single video view was a peek at the shortest of YouTube shorts at just one second long, and ran back to back without a single ad or break, it would take you 31,688 years to get through. To put it another way, a trillion minutes is 1.9m years, which is slightly more than six times the length of time the human race has existed. Impressive numbers indeed.

Why is Minecraft so popular?

There are a lot of reasons the game is so popular, with over 200m copies sold since it was released, and nearly 25m sold in 2020 alone, with the main one being the sense of freedom players get in the game. While other titles are insistent that you save the world, rob a bank or kill your childhood dog to progress the story (thanks Wolfenstein), Minecraft simply plops you into a blocky reality and leaves you to your own devices.

This same lack of forced action makes for a wonderful canvas on which content creators can make their magic, leading to an incredible diversity of videos under the Minecraft banner. From Dream’s phenomenal ‘Manhunt’ series to Mr Beast’s ability to utilise the game to create social experiments and insane giveaways, this has led to some outlandishly popular new series being created in Minecraft in the last couple of years.

Of course, you also have the more traditional fare, be that Pewdiepie’s own playthrough that brought new life and light to the YouTube community, or the ongoing insanity that is Hermitcraft, where some of the greatest builders the game has ever seen gather to construct incredible monuments. Then you have the roleplayers, and animators, and not to mention the speedrunners, 100 Days In…and so many more creators that play the game in 2021.

A big part of that longevity is also Mojang’s willingness to innovate and update their game, as the recent 1.18 update has shown, and with more massive changes coming in 2022 that isn’t going to stop anytime soon. For that reason, we fully expect the next trillion views to take less time than the first did for a game that has almost redefined what is possible as a developer, and that has provided such an awesome platform for a decade of creators to work from.

Image: Minecraft